Chat is Where it's At!
Communication continues to evolve through the use of technology. With the advent of the Internet, email became the gold standard for communications throughout the 1990s. However, the “fire and forget” approach of email also contained some productivity limitations especially in operations based environments. Simply said, waiting for a reply could take hours and there was no definitive confirmation of a message receipt. So began the concept of messaging and collaboration in the lexicon of the Internet.
Chat became the next evolution of communication, providing an interactive real-time application on a peer-to-peer or group communication basis. The advent of instant messaging exploded throughout the mid-late ‘90s with different platforms competing for the subscriber base. These messaging clients provided the ability to send text and conduct a “virtual” conversation without the need to pick up the telephone. AOL, Yahoo, CU-SeeMe, Jabber, and several others were all relevant players in the messaging market. In the years that followed, multimedia elements were added such as sharing video, attachments, and strings of characters used to express emotions, now called emoticons. As we headed towards the turn of the century, Instant Messaging became so pervasive that it seemed to replace text messaging, both in cost and in ease of use.
Let’s fast forward to 2010, where chat today has become part of a collaboration platform, integrating voice, video, live document editing, and geolocation presence in a single application. Workspace collaboration provides tremendous gains in productivity, both internal to a company and externally.
By design and function, the alarm monitoring space is a truly interactive world, where live signal processing and event handling can mean the difference between a safe outcome or a potentially risky life threatening issue. By extending the chat messaging capability into this space, SGS is able to successfully integrate multiple parties into a particular alarm event. The stages Chat can extend the chat capability to an interactive SMS messaging session for those users who are mobile as well. For example, if a fire alarm goes off, a stages customer can elect to have all the responsible parties communicate amongst themselves, conducting a discussion on how to handle this alarm event. Notifications also become interactive as the operator conducts other activities behind the scenes. In the event of a false alarm, all pertinent parties are notified at the same time, providing a unified response without the need for voice call. In this particular example, operational efficiency is gained without any delay in alarm response time.
Chat plays a important role in the alarm and device monitoring space. It provides users with the ability to monitor or communicate while an event is occurring. And it provides alarm monitoring companies the ability to conduct multiple tasks simultaneously without any degradation is response times. Moving forward, SGS will continue to evaluate collaborative technologies in order to improve the alarm monitoring operations space and improve communications for our customers.
Gary Stevens is a product marketing manager at Secure Global Solutions and has over 24 years of technology product management expereience. When he is not working, he is an avid photographer, certified drone operator, and enjoys playing soccer and rescuing golden retrievers.
